Why are so many adults afraid of a club?

Whatever possessed Jason Kenney to tell the Calgary Herald’s editorial board that Alberta schools should notify parents when their children join a gaystraight alliance club at school?

“I do however believe parents have a right to know what’s going on with their kids in the schools unless the parents are abusive,” Kenney told the board.

“I don’t think it’s right to keep secrets from parents about challenges their kids are going through.”

Clearly, Kenney learned nothing from watching former premier Jim Prentice fumble the Bill 10 debate. Why on earth does he want to re-litigate this issue now? And what is it about GSAs that makes so many otherwise sane politicians lose their minds?

A gay-straight alliance is not a sex club. It’s not a therapy group for LGBTQ kids. It’s not a program of homosexual brainwashing, designed to convert straight kids into queer or trans ones.

A GSA is just a student club, open to any and all who want to join it, gay or straight.

That’s the whole point of a gaystraight alliance: to bring gay and straight kids together.

Certainly, a GSA can help gay kids, and kids who are questioning their own sexuality or gender identity, to cope with the weirdness of adolescence, to feel safe and welcome in their own schools.

But GSAs are just as much for their straight classmates — to help them to become more effective and respectful allies in the fight for tolerance, to help them build healthy, supportive relationships with their own queer or trans friends or family.

In a typical high school, I’d warrant, a GSA often has more straight students than gay ones. That’s the whole point — not to ghettoize or segregate, but to bring people together. GSAs aren’t just about political activism or social support — they can also be about dances and bake sales and bowling nights, about having a fun place to hang out at lunch with your friends.

That’s just one reason Kenney’s belief that schools have a duty to inform parents when their kid joins a school club is so disquieting. The last thing we should be doing in 2017 is encouraging schools to perpetuate the belief that being gay is somehow shameful or worrisome, something that should be reported for the child’s own good.

How many straight students will want to join a gay-straight alliance if they know the school will call their parents, insinuating, perhaps, that they’re both gay and emotionally troubled? A GSA doesn’t work without straight members. And how many will join if they worry their own teachers or principals will “out” them — erroneously? All kids — straight as well as gay — should be able to join a social club without that kind of embarrassment.

Still, that’s far from the most troubling message in Kenney’s position. Schools, he says, should let parents know if their kids join GSAs — unless those parents are abusive. But how are staff always supposed to know, definitively, which parents are abusive — especially in a huge urban high school? How are staff to guess which parents could become distraught or dangerous on hearing the news that their kid might be gay? When we privilege parents’ “right to know” ahead of a child’s right to be safe, we genuinely put some students at real physical and emotional risk.

I don’t believe GSAs should be mandatory. They must evolve organically. If the students themselves aren’t interested in forming a club, holding meetings, hosting events, they won’t work.

Even GSAs that start with a burst of enthusiasm and goodwill can fizzle if course work gets too heavy, if the founding students graduate, if the kids get bored and lose interest or find other extracurricular things they’d rather do.

But why should publicly funded schools treat GSAs differently than they’d treat any other student-led club? Why, that is, unless deep deep down, we still do believe that it is, in fact, a shameful, dangerous thing to be gay — or to associate with gay friends.

If Kenney wants to be premier some day, he’d be better off focusing on his relations with the Wildrose, or on rebuilding depleted Progressive Conservative party coffers, or, say, on critiquing NDP economic policy. Then, maybe, he could leave the business of who joins which clubs to high school kids — who seem to have the maturity to manage this issue with more tolerance and social aplomb than most of the adults around them.